How Black-ish’s Searing Political Commentary Transcended “Very Special Episode” Territory

If you watched television in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, you know the structure of the Very Special Sitcom Episode. A hot topic of the day—drugs, domestic violence, race relations—comes knocking at the door of the characters you know and love, and while the sentimental music swells and authority figures make patronizing speeches, our sitcom characters learn A Very Valuable Lesson. You know you’ve definitely watched A Very Special Episode when the cast appears out of character after the story ends to read out a helpful phone number or Web address. In a cannier and more ironic age, these kinds of earnestly politicized sitcom episodes are scarcer on the ground; but Wednesday night’s episode of Black-ish dove headfirst into the Black Lives Matter conversation and, thanks in part to one very crucial scene, avoided the sentimental pitfalls of the Very Special Episode.

Though Black—ish show-runner Kenya Barris told The Hollywood Reporter he didn’t want to “politicize the show,” the series has, from the onset, taken on a political bent. The series tells the story of the Johnsons—an affluent African-American family struggling to raise their kids in the largely white culture of well-to-do suburbia. Intergenerational friction—often created by Laurence Fishburne’s Pops—means that among the typical family-sitcom antics, the show peppers in discussions of what it means to be black—or “black-ish”—in the modern world. Barris leaned into that discussion with the Season 2 premiere, titled “The Word,” which dealt with the n-word: who can say it, and when. He doubled down on the politics in last night’s episode, “Hope,” which dispensed almost entirely with the sitcom framework to focus the full half hour on Black Lives Matter.

Effectively a bottle episode, “Hope” didn’t attempt to over-sentimentalize the issue by involving a character in the show with the inciting police-brutality incident. Instead, the Johnsons, like many real-world families, were gathered around their TV sets and glued to the news. Though the episode hinged on the outcome of a fictional-but-all-too-familiar case of an unarmed young, black man’s brutal run-in with the police, the discussion between the family members brought in a number of real-world names. Junior (Marcus Scribner), the show’s earnest teenage son, waves around a copy of Ta-Nehisi Coates’sBetween the World and Me, while his father and grandfather cite Malcom X and James Baldwin.

And in one of the episode’s most unsettling sequences, members of the family rattle off real-world examples of how the justice system has failed black people in our country. After matriarchs Bow (Tracee Ellis Ross) and Ruby (Jenifer Lewis) instruct the kids to comply with any cops they might encounter, the patriarchs, Dre (Anthony Anderson) and Pops (Fishburne), fire back:

“Let’s say they listen to the cops and get in the car—look what happened to Freddie Gray,” Dre argues.

“And let’s say they make it all the way to the station—you remember Sandra Bland?” Pops adds.

“And let’s say they do make it to trial. You see where that gets us,” Dre says in reference to the fact that the fictional cops in this episode, like many of their real-world counterparts, are found completely innocent of any wrongdoing. “Don’t you get it, Bow? The system is rigged against us.”

This back-and-forth debate structure—used so effectively in nearly every episode of NBC’s The Carmichael Show—ensures that both sides are weighted and the police force isn’t completely villainized. But a subsequent scene, presenting more than this slightly balanced (though clearly in Dre’s favor) argument, is where the episode truly stands out.

Rolling out real footage of a freshly inaugurated Barack and Michelle Obama exiting their limo and waving to the crowd, Dre speaks emotionally about how proud he was that Obama was elected and how scared he was in that moment that the president would be assassinated.

It’s a powerful moment made all the more unforgettable by the fact that minutes before, Black-ish used footage of the assassinated Kennedys. This feeling of loss, impotent anger, and helplessness, the show makes clear, is not just a black issue.

The half hour, which also includes some great work from Yara Shahidi as a teenage daughter hiding her fear behind a mask of millennial disinterest, ends with the Johnsons deciding to join a fictional downtown protest. John Legend’s “If You’re Out There” closes out the episode as images of protests for gay rights, women’s rights, and Black Lives Matter flash across the scene. It was a half hour of television that, yes, leaned a little heavily on rattled-off statistics and, sure, occasionally bordered on preachy. But isn’t this something worth preaching about?